It was true, he had said, that she was living in one of the hardest countries to find staff jobs: no one ever left their positions at the Israeli papers, and reporters from all over the world competed for work at the foreign ones. But with her language skills — she also had Ukrainian from her grandparents and Russian from college, probably the one time her Slavic literature degree made her more employable — he’d lobby the higher-ups in Chicago to send her to Kiev if things got bad enough to need someone on the ground. That was four years ago, in the fall of 2004, and Talia remembered sitting in the flickering, fluorescent-lit conference room of the Jerusalem bureau, watching it all unfold on TV — the election fraud allegations, Yushchenko’s terrifying, ever-changing face — and holding on to a shameful, selfish hope for things to keep spiraling.
She’d always felt so envious of the other reporters at her paper in Jerusalem, none of them Israeli, all of them cabbing over to the bar at the American Colony Hotel every night after work, as if living out some vintage fantasy. They were all smart, they all spoke the language, many had relatives there and knew the country even before they were hired. But there was something so romantic about the way they saw their jobs, sinking into chairs in the garden bar, press passes still dangling from their necks, immediately launching into thrilling tales of how they were this close to danger that day, before pausing and taking a handful of the free cashews on the table. Even her bureau chief, whom Talia genuinely admired, still acted as though he was playing the part of the daredevil reporter, always driving himself into the territories, traveling with a separate passport through Lebanon and Syria, as if relentlessly performing for a rapt, imaginary audience back home in Chicago. It had always bothered Talia, listening to them debate her country’s politics, when it was implicitly understood that the moment their brushes with danger went from being this close to way too fucking close, they could leave. But then she was given the same opportunity, to be lifted from her life and plunked down in a place to which she had an even flimsier connection than many of her coworkers had to Israel, and she’d found herself guilty of that same excitement. Anyone would have felt it covering the demonstrations, of course. But she’d been just as amped in the months that followed, sitting in the stuffy, windowless media room in the district courthouse, or transcribing at her desk for hours, eating meal after meal of crackers with chocolate spread, as if everything took on a significance she’d never felt back home: the thrill of living on the other side of the glass.
Even the things in Kiev that should have frustrated her — the weather, the drunks who catcalled her on her way to work, the horrible bureaucracy that made even cashing her paycheck feel like that nightmare where she was walking down a long hallway and every door led to yet another endless hallway of doors — seemed funny and removed, as if they were simply anecdotes in an elaborate story she’d tell one day to her own imaginary audience back home. Her office building in Kiev housed foreign correspondents from all over the world, and she loved how easily they buffered the loneliness of living in a new place, heading down to Baraban, which had quickly become their default bar, every evening after work. Those nights, squeezed into a booth with her office mates and a roving crew of aid workers and NGO groupies, even her life in Israel seemed a little lighter, a little more entertaining, than it had actually been — as if she weren’t even describing her own neighborhood, her own family, but a cast of pushy and lovable characters on some wacky sitcom.
Then came the financial crash and her bureau chief called from Jerusalem with the news that the Chicago paper was closing some of its foreign desks, Kiev among them. It had nothing to do with her work, he said — they just couldn’t afford to keep her when they could get copy from the AP. “Try not to panic,” he said. “What’s that saying about things going to shit right before they’re good again?” He laughed, but it came out as more of a hiccup. Then he cleared his throat and suggested she go freelance. Which Talia did, though soon even that became difficult and she had to cut her rates by half, and one night she walked over to Baraban for a much-needed drink and found the place full of twentysomething American bloggers. A few months before she’d had a bad and wholly forgettable night with one of them — Ethan from Michigan — and had prayed he’d gone back to the States once jobs became scarce. But instead it appeared he’d invited all his friends from college to set up shop there, a cluster of them laughing and yelling in English, the other patrons forced to weave around their power cords, as if the Americans and their laptops had become as essential to the bar as its wobbly chairs and shelves of bottles that lined the wall.
“You’re lucky,” one of her old office mates said. He seemed to have implanted himself at the bar since his own layoff, and had the sallow pallor of a man who’d spent too many consecutive days drinking indoors. “You can go home and some war will start up again.” He was Danish, and Talia detected a spark of envy in his gaze. “Go back and wait,” he said. So Talia wrote to every contact she had in Israel, including her former boss at the American paper, who said he’d gotten word that they were now closing all the foreign desks and reshuffling the staff back home, and that he could tell her exactly what the job market was like, because after thirty-three years he was back in it, groveling for positions at wires he’d been overqualified for two decades ago. The one place where he could put in a call for her, he said, was at Boker Yisraeli. It was the free city paper the two of them used to mock, singsonging the glowing profiles of the wealthy businessmen who clearly funded it and their Judaica artist wives. But Talia knew she had no choice but to gratefully accept the offer. And though it was even worse than the first job she’d taken out of college, and though the pay was so low she’d had to move back in with her parents, back into her childhood bedroom, which was no longer her bedroom but her mother’s extended storage closet, the key, she told Tomer later that week at the Indian place, was to view her time home as a disappointing but brief blip in her real life abroad. “I’ve been home two months and I’ll stay through the summer,” she said. “The only way to get back into reporting is to be a one-man band, and the second I’ve saved enough for a video camera, editing software and sound equipment, I’m leaving again. But for now I’m here, fact-checking the features.”
“I know,” Tomer said, spearing a chickpea. “I Googled you.”
Talia frowned. “You’re not supposed to say that.”
“I found a couple stories you wrote on Yushchenko.”
“Oh,” she said, trying to sound offended, though the idea of him searching for her online was oddly flattering: she couldn’t even get her own family to feign interest. Tomer had seemed so nervous and overeager outside Café Noah, but here, signaling the waiter for another order of naan, he was surprisingly at ease. Or, rather, at ease with his overeagerness, as if he knew it afforded him an accessible charm. He was more attractive than she remembered, a large, hairy man with the harmless and comforting quality of a stuffed bear. The entire time she’d been talking he’d sat there smiling, as if experiencing a certain delight just being across the table from her. There was something so reassuring in that — for all the stress and disappointment she’d been feeling the past few months, all she had to do was share a meal with this man to get him to light up.
“And that piece on Gongadze,” he said. “Do you have a boyfriend back in Kiev?”